Caldwell sighed. “Look, transferring her wouldn’t be so simple. She was with Welland for thirteen years and came with his personal recommendation. He might be retired, but he still has a lot of pull through the old-buddy net. It could cause complications-especially at a time like this, when we’ve got all kinds of people looking for career opportunities and slices of the new action.”
“I have no interest in the adolescent attention-seeking antics and Machiavellian inanities of other people. If this woman-”
The door opened and Solomon Cail from the public-relations office appeared. “Oh… excuse me, Gregg. I didn’t realize. Mitzi thought you were alone.”
“I was away for a couple of minutes,” Mitzi’s voice called from outside.
“It’s all right, Sol,” Caldwell said. “Chris just stopped by. Is it something urgent?”
“As a matter of fact, it was Chris that I wanted to talk about,” Cail said.
“Me?” Danchekker looked suspicious. “What for?”
“Senator Greeling’s wife has been onto us again. It’s this women’s discussion group that she runs. We’ve as good as promised them a tour of the alien-life-form labs, and she wants the director to look after them personally-mostly to impress her friends, I guess.” Cail shrugged and showed a palm. “I know it’s a drag and all that, Chris, but Greeling did a lot of work for us, getting the college sponsorship program through. We don’t want to upset a friend like him if we can help it. She’d like an afternoon next month, maybe?”
“God help us,” Danchekker moaned bleakly.
A call-tone sounded in the outer office. Mitzi answered, and a moment later Ms. Mulling’s voice rang stridently through. “Is Professor Danchekker there, by any chance? He has an imminent appointment, and it is most imperative that I find him.”
And then Hunt appeared in the doorway on the far side of Mitzi’s desk, carrying a sheaf of papers in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. “Hello, what’s going on here? Ahah, Chris! Just the man.”
“Sol, give us a minute, would you?” Caldwell said, at the same time relieving Cail of any choice in the matter by rising and coming around the desk to steer him back toward the outer office. He waved Hunt in and closed the door behind him, holding up a hand to stay Danchekker before Danchekker could start talking again. “Yes, I’ve been aware of the problem for some time, Chris. But we needed a tactful solution that wouldn’t create more hassles than it cured.”
Danchekker shook his head and waved a hand impatiently. “I’m being turned into a club treasurer. We’ve got enough tally clerks and ledger keepers who can take care of that kind of thing. I was under the impression that this establishment was supposed to be dedicated to the advancement of the sciences. I’ve seen more-”
“I know, I know,” Caldwell said, nodding and raising a hand. “But something’s come up that-”
“Now they want to make me a tour guide for women’s tea-party outings. The whole thing has become farcical. It’s a-”
“Chris, shut up,” Hunt interrupted calmly. “Delegate the lot. That’s what being a director is all about. You haven’t got time, now, anyway. Gregg’s got an off-planet assignment for the two of us.”
“And not only-” Danchekker stopped abruptly and sent Hunt a questioning look. “Off-planet? Us?”
Caldwell grunted and nodded at Hunt to continue.
“On Jevlen,” Hunt said. “There’s a Thurien ship in orbit that’s due to go back there shortly. Just think of it: a whole planetful of alien biology, literally light-years away. I think that a director of life sciences should be breaking new ground in the field, don’t you?” But it was clear already that Danchekker needed no further convincing. His expression had the rapture of a revivalist seeing light through the parting of the clouds.
They came out of Caldwell’s office a few minutes later. “I think we’re going to have to come up with some other arrangement,” Caldwell said to Solomon Cail, who was still waiting. “Chris is going to be tied up on a priority project.” He indicated the door of his office with a nod, and Cail disappeared inside.
Danchekker strode over to the terminal where Mitzi was still holding Ms. Mulling at bay. “Ah, there you are, Professor,” the image on the screen began. “The review meeting-”
“Find Yamumatsu and get him there,” Danchekker said. His voice rang with the newfound confidence of the reborn. “Also, contact the secretary of the Republican Society and give them my apologies, but I shall be unable to attend. Maybe Yamumatsu would like to stand in for me there, too.”
For a few seconds Ms. Mulling was too shocked to reply; she stared back at him from the screen, open-mouthed, like a mother superior who had just heard the Pope proclaim his conversion to atheism. She recovered herself falteringly. “I don’t understand… What’s happened? Is something wrong?”
“Wrong?” Danchekker repeated lightly. “Not at all. Quite the contrary, in fact. Effective immediately, I shall be preoccupied with other matters. Have Brady come to my office, would you? Get out all the plans, charts, budgets, and other wastepaper that holds up the walls over there, and tell him he’ll be deputized as from tomorrow morning. I-” Danchekker spread both hands in a careless throwing-away motion, “-shall have flown.”
Ms. Mulling looked confused. “What are you talking about, Professor Danchekker? There are urgent things to be attended to.”
“I have no time for anything urgent. There are too many important things to be done, instead.”
“But-where are you going?”
“To Jevlen. Where else can a science of alien life be practiced?” Danchekker lifted a leg to dangle a sneaker-shod foot in view of the screen and waggled it provocatively. “Far, far away, Ms. Mulling. Beyond the horizons of imagination of the entire Republican Society, the verbal compass of a gaggle of senators’ wives, and even, if you are capable of comprehending such a thing, beyond the reaches of the sacred UNSA Corporate Procedure Manual.”
“Jevlen? Why? What are you going to do there?”
But Danchekker wasn’t listening. Hunt and Mitzi could hear him singing tunelessly to himself as he ambled away down the corridor beyond the open door.
“Far, far away. Far, far away…
CHAPTER TEN
Earth’s physicists were having to do a lot of rethinking to accommodate the new facts brought by the Ganymeans. Some of the most far-reaching revelations had to do with the fundamental nature of matter itself.
As some Terran scientists had suspected and been investigating without conclusive result since the late twentieth century, the permanency of matter turned out to be just another illusion to be thrown overboard with such notions as classical predictability and absolute, universal time. For all forms of matter were continually decaying away to nothing, although at a rate immeasurably small by the techniques so far available on Earth-it would take ten billion years for a gram of water to vanish completely.
The fundamental particles of which matter was composed annihilated spontaneously, returning to a hyperrealm governed by laws different from those that operated in the familiar universe. It was the tiny proportion that was disappearing at any instant that gave rise to the gravitational effect of mass. Every annihilation event produced a minute gravity pulse, and the additive effect of large numbers of these pulses occurring every second gave the apparently steady field that was perceived macroscopically.
Hence, gravity ceased being a thing apart in physics, a static effect, passively associated with a mass, and fell instead into line along with other field phenomena as a vector quantity generated by the rate of change of something-in this case, the rate of change of mass. This principle, together with means of artificially inducing and controlling the process, formed the basis of early Ganymean gravitic engineering-the drive system used by the Shapieron was an example of its application.